War in the Land of True Peace tells a long history of the Transversal del Norte, a belt of land separating Guatemala's highlands from the lowland Petén. Author Brent K. S. Woodfill has amassed an impressive amount of information ranging from the Early Classic period to 2018. As an ethnographer, I was skeptical when invited to review a book by an archaeologist, but I found the compilation of data engaging and well worth my time. Woodfill is competent in ethnographic and historical research as much as in the archaeology of the ancient past. As he widens his lens from the data to framing and analysis, however, he errs toward transhistorical continuity and transregional Maya unity, running against the grain of the data itself.

In confessional style, Woodfill begins by recounting his ethnographic naiveté that was slowly replaced by experience, familiarity, and expertise. As an archaeologist invited by Arthur Demarest (Vanderbilt University) to explore the remains of ritual activity in the region's caves, he was drawn into all sorts of perilous conflicts—between Q'eqchi’ Maya subsistence farmers, acquisitive ladinos (mestizos), foreign tourism entrepreneurs, transnational corporations, different religious groups, public and private archaeological organizations, looters, and competing political groups, as well as among the Q'eqchi' themselves. His sympathy for the Q'eqchi' and his interest in Classic Maya civilization inspired him to link with them for explanatory and political purposes. This leads him not only into in-depth research on the region over a period of 1,500 years but also drives him to make tenuous transhistorical analogies regarding spirituality. He surmises that contemporary Q'eqchi’ rituals relating to local spirit owners of landscape features—admittedly influenced by pan-Mayanism—reflect the concerns of Classic period Ch'olan Mayas. A transhistorical “Maya religion” and “Maya people” are based on very broad commonalities like animism and ritual reciprocity. Few would deny that cultures and languages always emerge from others, but the argument here is that the worship of sacred natural features is an unchanging transhistorical bedrock on which more fleeting—and cyclical—politics and economics are played. At times Woodfill waxes poetic about how (pan-)Maya spirituality is as enduring a “cultural logic” or “covenant” as the landscape itself, despite all the excellent social, political, and economic contexts that he painstakingly documents. Likewise, control over territory and Mayas themselves is reduced to control over sacred sites. In this tendency toward continuity, even the Guatemalan army is said to have a 500-year unbroken heritage. Fortunately, much of the transhistoricism is concentrated in Chapters 10 and 11, where he repeats data from previous chapters in blending disparate historical periods in the same disorienting paragraphs. Perhaps Woodfill believes such continuity bolsters contemporary Q'eqchi' claims to the Transversal, a noble but unnecessary contention.

Compilation of data is where Woodfill excels and where he contributes greatly to our knowledge of the region. His reconstruction of Transversal history is compelling and tragic, including details about the cruelty meted on the Ch'olan speakers not only by the Spaniards but also by the Q'eqchi'. The history of the Q'eqchi' who repopulated the region is appropriately painted as neocolonial and brutal from the Liberal era (1871–1944) through the civil war (1960–1996) to 2018. To his credit, he sides with the Q'eqchi' regardless of their cross-purposes with archaeology and academics generally and realizes that past and present experiences of colonization have severely dispossessed them materially and informationally (except spiritually). He is careful not to portray them unidimensionally as victims and maintains hope that their empowerment via the Maya Movement and the tenuous establishment of parks, which Woodfill and his colleagues helped create, will improve their lot. Woodfill, in fact, is a shining example of recent activist archaeology in the Americas and, better yet, is not starry-eyed about the ethical entanglements it entails. Suspiciously, however, this U.S. scholar's history wipes clean all U.S. military fingerprints from Guatemalan army strategies, intelligence gathering, hardware, counterrevolutionary programs, and the dictatorships themselves. This is also true for mid-nineteenth century explorer John L. Stephens, whose role as a U.S. agent is veiled.

For archaeologists, the book will be interesting for the detailed depictions of newly discovered Classic sites and artifacts that Woodfill and his collaborators discovered and excavated in the most spectacular caves and other sites. Although his use of contemporary ritual data to interpret the ancient past and his claims that the political intent of rituals can be determined by their locations in caves are speculative, his interpretations of ritual activity at sacred sites are also informed by a solid knowledge of Classic Maya history, during which the Transversal was transformed from an unprotected transit zone of highland and lowland resources, to militarized outposts of Petén metropolises, to highly competitive and fractured polities. Even though Woodfill leans toward spiritual continuity, and the serpent iconography of the pottery he discovers has parallels among twentieth-century Ch'olan language speakers in regard to rain, he ironically skirts any connections.

Despite the framing and minor historical errors and typos (mostly dates), this experimental blend of archaeology, historiography, and ethnography is by and large a success. It is essential for scholars of the region, a worthy read for Mayanist and indigenist scholar-activists, assignable to upper-level graduate and undergraduate students (I would exclude Chapters 10 and 11), and instructive for the public. The prose is readily accessible to a general readership, although the archaeological details may at times be tedious for lay readers.